"I like a good story, well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself." - Mark Twain

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Flick Pick: Enemy Of The State

Enemy Of The State(Touchstone, 1998)The late director Tony Scott was many things, including given to flash over substance, substituting jump-cut action for dialogue or plot development, and much more, but he unquestionably had an eye for arresting imagery, and he was always, in his movies, about ten minutes ahead of the world. Enemy Of The State demonstrates all of that in spades, and more. The awkward buddy-pairing of Gene Hackman and Will Smith, played dramatically straight, was casting genius. The number of credited and uncredited actors appearing in supporting roles is a pretty good Who's Who list in itself. But the story, which embarrassed the NSA at the time, turned out to be uncomfortably paralleled by real-life developments 15 years later, with revelations of the NSA spying on the Congress, the press, and every single citizen, and Tony Scott took the world there back in 1998. And with visual flash, jump-cut action, and an unsuspected amount of prescient substance, all wrapped up in tightly wound flick.

4 comments:

1911A1
said...

Considering the current "situation", perhaps you should make "The Omega Man" the subject of a Flick Pick. Because of your fine reporting on this subject, I see you as the Anthony Zerbe character at the start of the film.

While I lived in L.A. and had a classic Mustang once upon a time, I was thinking an MRAP with a minigun and AGL tandem in the turret; and an MP5SD with a thermal sight and IR laser, along with some NVGs.

Matthias and The Family wouldn't stand a chance.

I could also hang with flying the gyrocopter from Road Warrior, with a case of glass soda-bottle molotovs to drop over the side.

Purely as an apocalypse mental planning exercise.

There will be no Omega Man in the Flick Picks though. It never made the cut, and I'm wrapping the series up in a few more days at the one-year mark, which was always the point: 366 Movies - entertainment for a year.

After that, I'll probably start reviewing current flicks on occasion, if I see anything I'd recommend in the first place.It's been a pretty lean year or three for good movies.

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